


almost human

by VerdantMoth



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Guilt, Healing, Hopeful Ending, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Kinda dark?, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Past Child Abuse, Self-Worth Issues, background IronHusbands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-14 14:27:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20193748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdantMoth/pseuds/VerdantMoth
Summary: There are days Bucky wakes up, and he knows his skins gone all wrong again. His skin doesn’t fit, his bones are crooked, his teeth too sharp.He stares at his face in the mirror, touching pale, dead eyes and hollow cheeks, stroking a feather soft beard, and doesn’t know who he is.





	almost human

There are days Bucky wakes up, and he knows his skins gone all wrong again. His skin doesn’t fit, his bones are crooked, his teeth too sharp. 

He stares at his face in the mirror, touching pale, dead eyes and hollow cheeks, stroking a feather soft beard, and doesn’t know who he is. 

It’s not- Hydra didn’t do _ this _ to him. 

Not exactly. Not entirely. 

He remembers being a boy, and waking up in Becca’s bed this way. Remembers fingers in too-short hair tellin’ him stories he wasn’t hearing. 

Becca got it; she wasn’t entirely human. Especially not after daddy got his hands around her neck. After the social worker asked, “Well does he _ touch _ you?”

As if the only way for a daddy to hurt his princess-

Bucky used to think Becca got this way ‘cause she was an angel trapped in the body of a big sister. Might’ve been okay if God had remembered to put the _ human _in her little brother. 

Back then, they’d sit huddled on a limp mattress and whisper about other worlds and other lives and _ human _ didn’t matter. Humans were sickly, and if they weren’t, they held the belt. 

Now though- 

God, Bucky’s so damn glad heroes and monsters and gods and supers were just stories he and Becca used to tell each other. 

Tony gets it, Bucky thinks. When Tony finds Bucky in the bathroom, razor carefully stepping against his skin, he doesn’t say anything. He reaches under the sink and lays out the wipes and the alcohol and the bandages and he waits. 

Tony doesn’t tell the other, and when Bucky’s skin, stitched close and shielded by the long black shirts someone buys him, fits again, they sit and watch the news and share a beer. 

Tony’s a man wrapped in titanium alloy. If anyone gets being _ other _ it’s him. 

Steve doesn’t get it, but then Steve never totally got it. He holds Bucky through it. Or he did. But they don’t talk about it because Steve is Steve, big or small or draped in a goddamned flag and he’s never had to wonder who he was _ beneath _ it all. Steve is good. Becca was good, but a different kind of good. 

Tony is a man in titanium alloy and Bucky- Bucky was a monster long before Hydra cut his heart out. 

Tasha isn’t human and she knows it. She embraces it. But she knows how Bucky feels about being human. So she stands next to him on the ledge and holds his hand and smiles. One time, they fell. Not from high up, not on purpose. 

Once, before, between, when she still dressed in tu-tus and could pass for human, they fell against a mat laughing and she leaned up on an elbow and asked, “Did it hurt when you fell?” 

Bucky didn’t mean to, but he thought about being small, about sitting on a wooden bench as a man in a black suit yelled about brimstone and feelin’ his skin go prickly even as his breath froze in the air and he asked, “Which time?”

He thinks the worst part was she didn’t even blink at that response. She smiled, laughed, pulled him up and they ran before they were caught. 

She never asked again. 

But she stands with him on ledges when his skin is rippling, metal gears shifting and they rock back and forth, hand in hand, until his heart starts beating again. Then they step down and they drink cheap beer and they don’t talk about the beast behind their teeth. 

Bruce…

Bucky doesn’t talk about him monster with Bruce. Not when the other man has no control, had no choice. Bruce looks at him, and he wants to talk about it. But Bucky doesn’t know _ how _ to explain it. 

How, sometimes he thinks Hydra didn’t pick him because he survived the crash into the ice, or because of his skills with a rifle. 

They picked him because they _ knew_. They knew the thing he didn’t talk about. How some days he woke up and his eyes were black and his teeth yellow curves and his bones splintered. How his skin, soft and covered in dark hair, didn’t belong to him. He’d stolen it. Snatched it from some poor boy who just wanted to be _ good. _Worthy. 

Sometimes he woke up and there was a face in the mirror, sharp cheeks and a gentle nose and he’d stare at it, know he’d seen it in a million other mirrors, but he couldn’t recognize a goddamned feature. Not even the icy blue eyes, dead and murderous. 

Sometimes he thinks he should tell it to Bruce. Walk up and say, “Hydra didn’t _ make _ the creature, they just let ‘em loose from the cage.” 

But then he sees Bruce’s nails, short bitten and bloody, sees the tremors as Tasha talks him down and thinks, maybe he shouldn’t. It’s not _ Bruce’s _ fault, he lives _ with _ a monster.

It’s not the same as _ being _ the monster.

Sometimes Bucky can play human for weeks. He can smile, soft and shy, hover until someone waves him to a seat. Laugh at Thor’s jokes, at the banter, at Sam and Rhodey and Tony. Sometimes, he’s so good at playing human, and nudging Peter and eating cheap take out and sleeping until the sun blinds him, that he _ forgets_.

But then he wakes up and the sun’s light is the wrong kind of dim and his smile feels like fractured glass and his laugh, gravelly, smokey, shakes the room. 

He thinks it should hurt, waking up in a body he doesn’t own. He thinks he should howl with the pain, scream the way he’s seen a million broken men and women do. 

It doesn’t hurt, when his skin stretches wrong and his bones turn to tightly wound coils. 

He feels empty.

Empty, brittle. Two impossible feelings coexisting in a shell that belongs to someone else, and he feels tired. 

When he bleeds, it's still bright red, when he catches skin between his nails its brownpurplegreen. When he doesn’t eat he shakes and when he doesn’t move he’s stiff, rancid. 

A human body, he needs to care for, but the skin has gone wrong and the hair isn’t his so he tries to hack it off. 

Rhodey has to clean him up, has to shave the ragged chunks into something almost mortal and he’s got that look in his eyes; the one that says he and Tony talked about Bucky while layin’ in their bed.

Shitty pillow talk, even Bucky knows that, all inhuman as he is. 

Clint gets it, in a way Bucky doesn’t think anyone else does. Not Steve who is human, not Tony in his titanium alloy skin, not Tasha who stopped being human before she ever had the chance to know what human was. 

But Clint gets it. Bucky thinks, maybe it's the buckle shaped scars on his back, or the years of puttin’ on someone else’s costume just to survive. 

Or maybe Clint secretly ain’t human. 

He’s damn good at pretending though, and Bucky sort of hates him for it. His smiles always reach his eyes, even when they’re tragic and his laughter never sounds like glass bells on a cobblestone road. 

When Bucky wakes up, and his human shell is hollow and his eyes empty and his smile knife edged, he wants to hurt Clint. 

Because Clint gets it, he lets him. Let's Buckey into his bed, lets his fingers dig too deep and his teeth latch on. What they don’t talk about, or about how Bucky rides Clint. How his knees sink into a mattress that should feel soft and he anchors himself into broad, scarred shoulders and he bites his teeth until he can taste blood and screws his eyes shut so they might never open. 

They don’t talk about how little Bucky preps himself, how little prepping he needs. Or about how Clint’s hips stutter up, up, _ up, _and his hands settle on Bucky’s hips, too hot, too alive, a pulse that Bucky’s heart tries to match. Anchors that subdue the not-human pieces Bucky can’t reign in. 

They don’t talk about that moment, brief, feathery, where Clint brushes his lips to any skin he can reach, and everything settles in Bucky. How they lay, spent and sore and sticky in Clint’s bed, heads on a pillow together not talking. 

But Bucky can see his face in Clint’s eyes, almost. Almost knows the face that Clint smiles at. All sleep soft and pliant. He traces Clint’s nose and his lips and the pads of his fingers _ register _ heat and silky skin and stubble. His bones are solid, his blood red, his smile gentle and the right kind of crooked. 

Tony stitches him up and Tasha stands by him and Rhodey cleans him up and he and Bruce don’t talk about their similarity and Steve doesn’t understand it.

But Clint holds him while he shakes and he tells him stories, legends and myths and _ other, _and he brings Bucky back into his borrowed body and makes him feel like he owns it. 

Maybe it’s not right, that Bucky should feel human in those moments. 

Maybe it’s wrong he’s allowed to keep this stolen skin. 

But caught in Clint’s arms, and watching his eyes, he knows. Clint’s only almost human, and if Clint can be only almost human and still be good, well, maybe there’s a goddamned chance for Bucky, even if sometimes he doesn’t quite succeed.

He always bleeds red, and it’s not much, but it’s close enough to almost good.


End file.
